Small mercies, the vendor caved and refunded enough of the price of the VX6 Mules to make fixing them worth the effort. Grace's purchasing agent must have been very scary.
Grace was on the horn to the port authority the second we accepted delivery for the new power couplings, plus some spares, for the Mules. I was surprised at how quick our departure was. That was the good thing about a small ship, I supposed. We were locked up and pulling out of our dock before I finished eating lunch.
Fortunately, I remembered to send a message to the kids while I was waiting in the galley for the trays to heat. I let them know about my new post and a heavily sanitized version of my escape from Mimir. Knowing them, they'd probably suspect some of what I was holding back, but not all of it.
The trick to managing hyper-intelligent offspring was to keep tactical secrets. They always assumed I was hiding something to keep from upsetting them when I had news like this, so I usually kept two secrets; the one I wanted to hide and a less upsetting one I could drop as a decoy.
In this case, I'd let them figure out about the mutiny on their own and leave the details of how I survived it left unsaid.
We'd see if that passed muster when we hit the Frontier. Freeport Romulus would be our next big stop and Romulus would catch any slip I made.
I was distracted from my navel gazing when Grace sent out a shipwide ping to give us an updated itinerary and timetable.
"Looks like we're changing up our route," Elaine sighed. "It's the better part of valor, but we're gonna be another three weeks between ports if we cut through the Aquila cluster instead of Scutum."
"That's better than being too predictable and we'll still be well within our delivery window," I pointed out.
Underneath the table I felt one of her ankles lightly rest against mine. I checked her expression. She wasn't looking at me, but then she took a quick glance in my direction when I didn't pull away.
Oh, she was testing an intimacy boundary.
I let my leg lean naturally in her direction to affirm the touch and a tiny smile flitted across her face. I smiled back and the contact took on a deliberate weight that felt like an agreement.
Afterwards, Elaine walked me back to the botshop. We hadn't talked much during lunch. Between Brando's status updates from the cargo bay and Taj's continually updating departure windows, there was too much going on in the feed to carry on more than a half distracted conversation.
"Oh, hang on a second," Elaine said as we passed by her workshop. "I got you something."
I cocked my head in surprise as she darted in and came out with a folded quilt with a small tasseled bolster balanced on top. The quilt looked handmade even if the squares were made out of cut-up shipsuit materials and scrap cloth. It was a knotted quilt and it felt reassuringly heavy when I accepted it from her hands. Heavy meant good insulation power, right?
"I saw it when we passed through that popup market earlier," she explained. "I forgot about this until it was too late yesterday, but I thought you might want something extra to make that support pod more comfortable and you mentioned that you run cold so...."
Elaine trailed off rubbing the back of her neck. I could see a red flush blooming along the shell of her ears.
"I like it," I told her with honesty. I managed to refrain from saying 'you didn't have to.' I'd learned the hard way that gift-giving people already knew that they didn't 'have to.' They wanted the validation of seeing their gift being enjoyed. "I meant to look for something similar while we were out, but I was having such a good time that it slipped my mind."
(My noisiest auxiliary lodged a complaint that this task had not been added to the agenda. I shushed it.)
Elaine brightened immediately. "Really?" she asked.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"Really."
She stepped in a little closer and I felt my pulse pick up its pace. "I, um, I think we're on the same page, but I wanted to say I really enjoyed spending time with you and I'd like to do more of that—as something more than friends."
The redness around her ears spread to her cheeks and I went very, very still. Whatever was happening here, I didn't want to interrupt it or distract her.
Elaine kept going. "I know this is a little sudden. I'm not usually this person. I just felt such a connection with you from the moment we met. I'd really like to explore that feeling, if that's something you would also like."
I felt myself nodding. We'd sort of drifted closer as she spoke until a clatter of metal down the corridor startled us apart.
When I turned, a sheepish-looking bot skittered backwards and started to laboriously reset the container of washers it had knocked over when it rounded the corner. I queried its task queue and found that it had been reorganizing my inventory of spare parts to make room for the Mules' backup power couplings, which explained why there was a bunch of my stuff loose in the hall and not secured in my workshop where it was supposed to be.
To be clear, I had plenty of room for the couplings, but my auxiliary in charge of the shop wanted the parts categorized by part number and brand. I didn't have an existing space for Mercer products, so it had requested some new shelving from the fabricators and was in the middle of installing it.
"I should probably go check on whatever's going on over there," I sighed.
"I wondered how similar the bots were to talented interns," Elaine chuckled. "Now I have my answer. They're brilliant until you need an uncomplicated solutions. Reminds me of grad school."
"That's an unfortunately accurate summary," I agreed. Still, I didn't want to lose the mood entirely. "I'll come get you for dinner, alright?"
Elaine grinned at me. "Can't wait."
I held up the stacked quilt. "Thank you for this, it's exactly what I was hoping to find."
After we parted, I made my way back to my shop and the support pod. The heater started blasting as soon as I sealed myself inside, so I let the heat soak in a bit before I wiggled under the cover. The bolster was just squashy enough to support my neck a little, while cupping the back of my head at a comfortable angle. Between that and the weight of the quilt, I felt much more comfortable and less distracted by my body as I dove back into my work.
Unfortunately, I soon discovered the hidden problem with being too comfortable in my pod.
I was fine, so long as I had an active task, but I found myself at loose ends once I'd cleared my own queue. As soon as my mind was no longer occupied, the light trance-state I maintained during my work easily transitioned into real sleep and I fell into a dream without realizing it.
In the dream, I found myself returned to the age of eleven or maybe twelve. I was back in the sterile halls of the creche school. There had just been a big intake of new kids; refugees from some mining disaster. I'd never heard all the details, I just knew that a lot of adults in one of those small nomadic mining groups had died and the survivors were mostly underaged children.
"Take him," one of the custodians said as she thrust a wriggly brown toddler into my arms. "We need all the older children to step up for a little while. Keep him with you until we get through onboarding all the new children and assigning them to their classes."
The toddler was red-faced from crying, but too exhausted to do more than lean heavily into my arms. He, like all the other little kids who'd just arrived, had been crying for hours and demanding to see their parents.
I'd been through this part before and I hated the next part that was coming; the moment when they started to realize that their parents weren't coming back. You could see it in their eyes when they came to realize that this new situation wasn't temporary.
When I looked down to the little boy, he already had that hollow, glazed look in his dark brown eyes. I wondered how long it had been since he'd seen his parents.
"Come on, Bubi," I said to coax him away from the throngs of hysterical orphans before he could get upset again via osmosis. The custodian hadn't told me his name and he didn't have one assigned in the feed yet, so he'd have to put up with my best attempt at nickname for the next little while until either the colony coughed up his identity packet or the creche assigned him one. "Let's find something to eat."
I snorted awake as an alarm trilled between my ears and one of my auxiliaries apologized for waking me up. My head spun a little as I tried to make sense of the problem it had woken me up to solve; some of the little cleaning bots turned up with corrupted drivers when it had done the daily diagnostic.
"Good job, good job," I praised it, breaking halfway through on a yawn.
The backup driver registry lived on a set of crystal nodes in a case that only opened with my palm print, which wasn't something my auxiliaries could work around so I let myself out of the support pod to go bustle around the shop.
I marveled at my subconscious trying to tell me things I already knew as I swung out of my support pod, in search of the backup disc.
Bubi hadn't been my baby—but, in a way, he had been my first foray into motherhood. It had taken actual years for the custodians to finish his intake. He was four or five by the time they got him officially enrolled in the pre-education course. Up until that point, he'd slept in my bed, ate in the cafeteria with me, and followed me everywhere I went.
It figured that my subconscious would use him to prod me into realizing I had another one on the way.